To be, or not to be a feminist? I've recently had to reconsider my position. This is no doubt because I've been consumed lately with the idea of sex work. From writing aresearch paper about prostitution in Mississippi to wrap up my last undergrad semester, to perusing pleasure reading since graduation about the Dancing Girls of Lahore and an escort in San Francisco, I've had many perspectives to consider.
FRAMING SEX WORK AS A FEMINIST ISSUE
I’m taking the position that sex work is, indeed, a feminist issue. While I realize that men, too, participate in sex work and that it affects those men’s lives in very real and profound ways, I’m convinced that male sex workers are a minority in the global sex trade, and that males’ lives have not historically been as shaped by their sexual value as have the lives of females. Males have historically been afforded more avenues of achieving success in any given society, while women, in the absence of other means of subsistence, are more often left to rely upon their sexuality as their sole agency for survival.
If anyone has any evidence to offer that might convince me that sex work should not be framed as a feminist issue, please do share.
THE OWNERSHIP OF FEMALE SEXUALITY
Historically, women’s sexuality was not their own; ownership of female sexuality reverted to a male relative or husband. Throughout history proper, some form of femme covert or another has existed, which consistently included a woman’s sexuality as a part and parcel of her legal identity. That is, the male with the most immediate interest in a woman’s procreative activity – which will not always be one man; that will change as a girl grows into a woman and her marital status changes through divorce or death – exerted the most direct influence over her life course.
This is, of course, an phenomenon which primarily affects upper class women. The sexuality of women of the lower rungs of society, those who have already been ascribed a deviant label by virtue of their poverty, is less valuable, freeing such women to flout the dominant society’s moral dictates, and take ownership of their own sexuality in order to exploit it economically as a means of survival.
THE COMMODIFICATION OF FEMALE SEXUALITY
Since the very earliest literate societies, women’s sexuality has been commodified by the dominant patriarchal society. This is a pattern that has had millenniums to become etched into human society, and which we have only recently begun to question. Women's exploitation via their participation in sex work is but one manifestation of a primordial control-mechanism of the patriarchy, but a telling one indeed.
It is because of the realization of this truth that I have lately been questioning my hesitancy to embrace the feminist label. Perhaps it is, after all, an ism with which I ought to associate myself.
